Werewolf Moon (The Pack Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

These silent auctions as well as the impressive growth rate of Raya’s Lupein Corporation all moved toward one goal: funding the pack’s newest non-profit, a charity called “
A Table
” (French for “Dinnertime! Come eat!”). Raya had spent eons thinking of ways to ensure that people, especially children, would all have sufficient food no matter where they lived. And if he could do so by skinning those who had far more money than scruples, all the better. ‘
A Table
’ was a good start in that direction as chapters had sprung up in more than seventeen countries, more every year.

The pack itself had created or bought countless businesses, both individual and held concurrently by the pack itself. By the beginning of the 20th century, Raya had become involved in searching for businesses either failing or run by ‘wrong types’ as he called them. His own Lupein Corp would acquire such enterprises and the fun would begin.

Raya far preferred to turn new enterprises over to new management, chosen from a pool of carefully-chosen people who’d been down on their luck, yet had powerful drive to succeed all the same. He had world-wide eyes looking for such prospects. Yes, a couple of businesses created and run in such a fashion had failed- but the lion’s share had not only succeeded spectacularly, but succeeded in giving back to ‘
A Table
’ in the process. Raya was happier than he’d ever believed possible when a call came in that would change not only his life, but the lives of the pack themselves.

Chapter Nine

Rats

Cine inventeaza o noua lumanare arsuri 100 acum sau ceasuri satul arde mai târziu.

He who invents a new candle burns 100 now or watches the village burn later.

—A Romani saying

The call came from one of Raya’s army contacts and regarded what Raya now called the RRP (Real Rat Pack,) the renegade criminal pack in Europe who had developed into talented thieves, assassins, mercenaries—all for anyone with sufficient funds. They’d become infamous during WWII when they’d operated for whichever side had paid them best at the moment. Several times they’d even swapped sides as soon as one operation was ended. Ever since, their successes had been labeled “extraordinary” by both the press and a fascinated group of Hollywood actors.

The pack was shunned by Weres everywhere for many reasons, including their sheer numbers. eight was the ‘magic’ number for a wolf pack, nine at most. The RRP, however, added indiscriminately to their pack, even reaching three digits—beyond one hundred Weres—on occasion. It was enough to turn Raya’s stomach.

The current situation involved a pack of four wolves who’d barely escaped from Europe and the RRP with their lives. It wasn’t clear how this small pack had tangled with the RRP in the first place, and that gave Raya an uneasy feeling.

He did know that the small pack had booked passage on a tramp steamer bound for Ripero, New Jersey. The name of the city alone sparked a fleeting memory as Raya had heard somewhere that Ripero , ‘shelter’ in Italian, was a model city built by the Cavello Corporation, well known for their motto ‘
where garbage becomes treasure.’
Everyone knew that the Cavello Corporation was a shiny front for a bunch of none-too-shiny characters better known as the Italian mafia, namely the Gambini family.

Cavello Corporation consisted of squeaky-clean business types who’d graduated from Harvard Business School and the like. In truth, one old Italian who lived by his own code was single-handedly responsible for every major move or decision at Cavello: a certain Don Gambini.

The don was determined to prove that several revolutionary new chemicals created by Cavello’s top chemists would treat any landfill and create a clean, safe location where a city could then be built. So many landfills existed across America, but that land was considered ‘lost’ and ‘unusable.’ Anyone who proved able to recover those millions of lost acres would be heralded as a hero, and make a fortune in the process. The Don, who preferred to live in the shadows, cared nothing for the ‘hero’ designation but was more than interested in the fortune to be made. Although far from poor, another one of the Don’s cherished mottos was ‘there’s never enough.’

The first city to actually be built atop a landfill, and an enormous landfill at that, was Ripero.

Cavello’s scientists had invented a chemical which reduced most non-recyclable garbage into a water-permeable substance almost as hard as cement. Cavello named this substance GarTres. Ripero itself was oblivious to what lay beneath it, a sizeable hill of pure GarTres covered by fifteen feet of the best dirt money could buy.

The story had appeared in one tabloid or another and of course Petra had spotted it as her weakness was reading those rags. She delighted in the absurd and surprising Raya with the latest. Ripero’s tale had hit on all cylinders: built on trash by trash! Who could resist, she’d told Raya several weeks before as she provided details with wicked glee.

Raya’s phone rang again, interrupting his thoughts. Now the terrified European pack were down a wolf, as there’d been a confrontation between the Weres and some sort of security force in the streets of Ripero. One of the werewolves had been shot and killed. When the others attempted to flee the area, this mysterious security group had blocked every possible egress, forcing the Weres to find a place to hide within the city itself.

Raya hung up, called Petra in her studio and asked her to gather the pack for a trip to New Jersey in the morning.

Chapter Ten

Ripero: Treasure City

One man’s trash is another’s treasure.

—Unknown

If the Cavello Corp, and the Italian brains behind those puppets, had had any idea of the repercussions behind that one Were’s death, the entire situation would have been handled far differently.

Cavello Corp remained in blissful ignorance, though, and events rolled on to an inevitable conclusion.

As Cavello concentrated its considerable forces on finding the remaining three hapless Weres, a small group of Cavello scientists were uneasy for an entirely different reason. In their large, pristine lab several stories below ground level, Dr. Ricky Helton was squinting at his computer screen and rubbing his bald pate. His assistant, Jennie, walked in with fresh coffee.

“Dr. H, drink this. You need a break,” Jennie said.

“Break, shmake,” Helton replied. “That Ripero, I tell you it’s going to—”

“Enough already,” the exasperated woman said. “You’ve had those feelings for what, six years now? And look at Ripero! Less illnesses on an average than any other US city. Less crime. Less—”

“Yes yes, I know the stats too,” Helton said. “I feel like we overlooked something when we tested that plastic compound, if you can call those hasty experiments really ‘testing’ at all. It’s going to come back and bite us in the ass, mark my words.”

Out of his line of sight, Jennie rolled black eyes behind thick glasses and left the room to make her way back to the main lab.

There was one obvious flaw in the GarTres process, and Helton was well aware of it. There were two steps in treating a landfill before it would be livable. The first step involved dumping a soup of chemicals that burned any plastic to ash while ignoring all other materials. The ‘soup’ slid its way through the entire landfill in a matter of hours, thanks to one particular chemical created specifically to ‘slide’ rapidly but thoroughly through any mixture.

Once the landfill was free of plastics completely, two brand-new chemicals were carefully combined and added to the landfill, along with the ever-useful ‘slider’ chemical. These chemicals were almost magical but were used with the full knowledge that they would never to come into contact with any form of Polyethylene Terephthalate or Dacron, a specific type of plastic used in synthetic fibers such as water bottles. As all plastics had been removed in Step one, there should never be a situation where the GarTres chemicals would ever be in contact with Dacron plastic, as the GarTres was buried beneath fifteen feet of normal dirt.

Moreover, what would really happen if Dacron did came into contact with the chemicals in GarTres? At most, a small heat reaction would ensue, the scientists had assured Cavello Corp. No reason to worry as no plastics were anywhere in that landfill: Step one had assured that.

In a hurry to bring the product to market, Cavello Corp hadn’t bothered to test the exact results of what would happen should Dacron came into contact with those GarTres chemicals, figuring in-depth tests could be run when there was more time.

But when the three wolves were forced to rapidly bury their friend, they’d dug the normal twenty feet deep as necessitated by the Lupein Codec, even several hundred years ago, Raya had understood that werewolf bodies needed to stay buried. When the Weres had placed their friend in his grave, at the last moment one had sadly thrown the last thing he’d given his friend: a little water bottle with a cartoon on it, a private joke.

The three Weres had finished shoveling all the dirt back over their friend, said a prayer and left.

The GarTres didn’t come into immediate contact with the Dacron water bottle because as the distraught Weres shoveled dirt over their friend, they began shoveling ever-larger shovelfuls of dirt to hasten the dreadful process. One such hit the water bottle squarely on top, knocking it between their friend’s right arm and his torso. Another even larger load of dirt knocked the Were’s arm sideways, directly over the water bottle as if to protect it.

Over the course of several days, the dirt settled. As GarTres was heavier than plain dirt, it worked its way busily downward until it could go no farther. The Were’s body served as a block, but the GarTres still had traces of that “slider” chemical and tended to move a little more than dirt normally would. Therefore, when a small chunk of GarTres came to rest on the Were’s arm, it slid down until it encountered a small empty space. It then dropped and landed with a small splat directly on the grinning teeth of the cartoon that decorated the water bottle.

If one had watched sufficient horror movies and had been anxiously awaiting the unknown and untested reaction between GarTres and Dacron, the cartoon would suddenly be lacking teeth as first effect of the dreaded contact would be instant destruction. The reality was far more boring: the reaction produced a minor amount of a certain chain of DNA. Nothing may have ever happened had not Miss Henry’s prize Great Dane been digging hard and fast after an intriguing scent. The dog never did locate anything, but something found it: an infinitesimally small chain of that DNA, just minutely different from that of the dog. In fact, that one section represented nothing exciting whatsoever, simply a fifty million year regression of canine DNA. In plainer language, the DNA that dog (or any other living creature) would have had fifty million years ago. There was no immediate effect when that DNA slipped into the Dane’s body and made itself right at home, but DNA is friendly: it enjoys moving around, visiting others.

Three months later when the burial had been entirely forgotten by anyone except the small pack of grieving Weres, an exceedingly odd series of incidents happened. Any puppies (registered show puppies and their less fortunate siblings) born out of a bitch who’d crossed paths even at a distance from that Great Dane, showed the same unique but deadly effects: they were born with a perfect set of gills. The minute they exited the womb, they gasped frantically and died in minutes. The only difference between the show pups and mutts was that the former had humans in attendance, humans who completely panicked when their beautiful animals slid out of the womb and died in such a dreadful manner, with ugly gills flapping madly on their tiny necks.

Instantly, Ripero moved from the very model of a modern perfect living experience to a veritable nightmare for dog lovers, in particular those who bred them willingly or otherwise. The Cavello Corporation PR Team was presented with a problem different anything they’d ever faced: this was a catastrophe beyond comprehension. The real power behind the Cavello Corporation, of course, was pragmatic. There really was only one viable solution. Rid the city of canines, of course, and any humans who overly protested that act. In fact, why not delouse the perfect city by exterminating any humans who had canines at all?

If a corporation worker turned pale, it was because they themselves had a dog. No other reason.

Chapter Eleven

A Rough Landing

Raya and the pack had been in the air heading to New Jersey for only ten minutes when he heard something he’d never heard before yet instantly recognized: the sound of the Uber Werewolf’s voice.

“Turn plane around: go home. Do it now,” the deep voice growled in his ear. There were no possible questions: only acquiescence. Raya turned to Petra and commanded, “Have a heart attack. Do it now.”

Petra had only heard that tone of voice from her mate on few occasions, but was fully aware of its meaning. She took immediate action by excusing herself, climbing over Raya and emerging into the aisle. Once there, she took two steps and began gasping for air before dropping to her knees. Then she clasped a hand to her chest and let one tiny shriek before toppling face-forward.